Something to file away on the screwing of America.

It seems Neil Cavuto of Fox Business News got a bit testy with Larry Kudlow yesterday on the issue of tariffs to be imposed on China. Ken Kruger3 supplied a comment with some interesting personal experience and some insight into what the Chinese mentality might be and who it was, exactly, that got the short end of the stick in past trade with China:

I would like to ask Cavuto how many times he's been to China. I spent a lot of time there and I can tell tell you that they are a paper tiger. Why else would they react in the way they did. Who reacts the most violently? The freeloader who gets his welfare reduced or the taxpayer whose hourly rate or hours are cut? Of course China is going to throw a huge tantrum. I should know. I married a woman from China who is a master of tantrums...and will never take responsibility for her actions but has a sense of entitlement. As for her country of birth, there is no way they could have built the infrastructure that they have without huge disparities in trade.^[1]

It is a variant on Trump’s really magnificent statement, also on April 4:

"We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S."

Trump frustrates me in a few areas but, God bless him, he showed up after 30 years of American “leaders” being willfully blind about our being taken advantage of around the world (and voluntarily giving away every advantage we have) and simply observed, “Hey, we’re getting the short end of the stick in Mexico, NATO and with China.” Exactly what Orwell was talking about when he said, "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."

The status quo ante Trump was that the Chinese manipulated the value of their currency, extorted billions of dollars of intellectual property, and paid off U.S. politicians to turn a blind eye to their crap or to allow the export of our technology. Our treasonous elites didn't care as long as they got theirs. It never would have occurred to me to think this way in 1988. Now you're just waking up from a very long coma if you don't.

Notes
^[1] Ken Kruger3 commenting on "Cavuto Battles Kudlow in Tense Standoff: You Don’t Sound Like the Larry Kudlow I ‘Respected and Admired.’" By Joe DePaolo, Mediaite, 4/4/18. (Too many comments on this article so I wasn’t willing to doublecheck that Ken Kruger3 made his comment on it or on an article on ZeroHedge, the next most likely site. I didn’t make it up. Honest.)